During my alleged 10th birthday at the Rattlesnake Rode in Ezekiel, Mississippi (I’d turned 12 the month before, to the detection of nobody), my diddy, R.T., between belches, advised me – “Do what you love, never get paid a day in your life.” Even back then I thought it was strange, unwanted (and possibly worse), honest advice for a teenage boy to receive from his gassy dad. But R.T. was an ex-drunk burpin’ his way through a 12 rack of Mr. Pibb and a half-eaten rattlesnake kebab. My stepmother, Rhonda, had flown the coop days earlier. Not that this was a surprise. My father occasionally deigned to weld boats together in Pascagoula – but more often wielded a mangled version of the English language at the Feed & Seed (with bon mots like jank-hole, bung-buster, goon-glue). Post-Rhonda, R.T. took me on punitive pilgrimages to the VFW, where he’d bully me into playing Hall & Oates on the geriatric juke before blubbering into his Mr. Pibb (and his unfinished nutria nuggets), parsing the particulars of bad love as though our own lives weren’t too ugly to say.
Matt Johnson